There are numerous applications today for editing and creating multimedia presentations. Examples of such applications include Final Cut Pro® and iMovie®, both sold by Apple Computer, Inc. Such media editing applications often use a particular project file format (.pff) and have a particular rendering engine that are not familiar to other applications. This lack of familiarity is problematic in situations when the other applications want to analyze media items (e.g., movies) produced by the multimedia editing application.
In these situations, the current solution is to have the multimedia editing application export its media content (i.e., its media items) into a standard format (e.g., a Quicktime® format). Such an approach has several disadvantages. First, it is time consuming. Second, it often requires storing the exported content on disk. Third, the multimedia editing application often stores the exported content in a compressed fashion, which, in turn, increases the other application's processing time and reduces the quality of the multimedia content. Fourth, the cumbersome and inefficient exporting operation has to be repeated when the multimedia editing application modifies the previously exported media content. Therefore, there is a need in the art a method that allows one application (referred to below as the “media client”) to have access to the media items of another application (referred to below as the “media server”) without having any knowledge of the media server's implementation, such as its project file format, rendering engine, etc.